Ad Age is marking Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month 2023 with our Honoring Creative Excellence package. (Read the introduction here.) Today, our guest editor Soyoung Kang turns the spotlight to Ambika Gautam Pai, chief strategy officer at Mekanism, mother of two and creator of the newsletter-turned-podcast “Corner Office Breakdowns.”
Here, Pai shares her thoughts on helping to launch Frida Mom’s breast care line.
In October 2020, I walked into my bedroom/office/husband’s office and sat down at my computer for the first time in five months. I was back from maternity leave, after having my first child during the depths of COVID. I was seven months pregnant when the pandemic hit. The New York hospitals were so overwhelmed with patients, my OBGYN asked me if I had anywhere else I could go to have the baby. No one knew how long the pandemic would last, what its impact would be on pregnant individuals and their babies, and the situation in New York was too volatile. So my husband and I packed up our bags and headed to my parents’ house in Cleveland.
Nothing about my pregnancy had been normal. Nothing about my maternity leave, stuck inside with a newborn—alone with my thoughts, anxieties, fears, insecurities—was normal, either. There were no mom groups, no meals with friends, no support system at all. So that day, my first back at work, I was in the depths of postpartum depression, wondering how I was going to manage mothering, being the chief strategy officer of an agency I loved, and doing the sort of work that could maybe, just maybe, make the world a better place for my children.
from Digital Marketing Education https://ift.tt/XHT2yF0
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